Equality and sameness are not the same thing.
If Ivan is better at programming, Peter is better at building, Maria is better at dealing with people, and a fourth person simply wants a quiet life, there is no rational reason to make them identical.
But that does not mean one of them should have fewer rights, less dignity, or become the property of another.
A different social principle is possible:
equal human status, radically unequal life trajectories.
Equality before the law. A basic level of security. Access to essential opportunities. The right to choose one’s own path.
But not the requirement to work the same way, consume the same things, want the same things, or achieve the same outcomes.
This is where an abundant AI future may change an old problem.
Under hard scarcity, inequality is brutal. If one person has food and another does not, the difference is survival. If one child has a teacher and another does not, their futures diverge. If expert help costs €300 an hour, expertise itself becomes a class privilege.
But imagine a world where food is cheap and abundant, education is highly personalized and inexpensive, intellectual services are widely available, entertainment is almost unlimited, administrative help costs almost nothing, and much of what once counted as a “rich” experience can be produced digitally.
Property inequality would not disappear.
But property might lose some of its power to buy an entirely different order of human experience.
That matters.
Perhaps the goal is not to make people equal in everything. Perhaps it is to make a very good human life broadly accessible, while allowing people to remain profoundly different.